In the first part of this series we spoke then about promoting software to your customers on a try-before-you-buy model, converting the customers from your website and sending newsletters to your audience to grow your sales.
Here are 2 more ideas other affiliates have found productive while promoting software products online:
Use discounts to get traffic and increase conversions
Coupons have an important role in the online purchase flow – potential buyers will always try to get a lower price for the product. They don’t even have to search explicitly for coupons – lots of coupon websites show up among the first results when you search for a product.
Hence, if you don’t have a dedicated coupon website and want to boost up your least performing product, you could try offering your visitors exclusive coupon for those products. You can get them from the merchants or you can even generate them yourself and the discount amount will be deducted from your commission – some affiliate networks (including Avangate) offer this possibility.
If you have significant traffic on your website and a good relationship with the merchant, you can even ask for a discount coupon of greater value which you would use to run a deal-of-the-day campaign – e.g. 70% off Product X – today only. A good example of such software niche website is BitsDuJour.
Engage the community
Engage the community in adding value to your website. The main thing you would be interested in is original content – in the form of product reviews, comments or even self-made videos related to the products you’re promoting.
Take one small step at a time: start building an online community around your website (if you don’t already have one) and engage them to create content for you (watch out for mistakes). User generated content is at great value now.
Once you have a stable nucleus of people around your website, you can run various loyalty campaigns to further consolidate and motivate them in generating original content for you.
These are just a few of the ideas we’ve seen at work successfully. What did you do to run a successful affiliate campaign?
